"Thomas_M._Disch_-_After_Pottsville" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

"I don’t want anything from you. And I don’t want to be ‘assimilated’ into your goyish shithole. Is that clear? I don’t see how I could make it any clearer." A single precious tear moistened his stubbled cheek.

But Terry insisted. "We must learn to be friends, David. Here–give me your hand."

He extended his own hand, palm up, and David, who could not act otherwise, placed his left hand in Terry’s. They both stared at the object of shredded flesh and splintered bone as though it were an item of ritual significance, a pyx or scroll whose esoteric markings must be pondered and taken to heart.

But for now it was inscrutable, mere meat like the beef or lamb that was dressed and blessed, packaged, frozen and shipped from the Jews’ kosher slaughterhouse. Terry handed it back to David Golden with a sense of embarrassment, as though he had accidentally touched the man’s genitals. Then he went across the street, leaving David rocking back and forth with a grief that had begun to be conscious, though still it was silent.



Terry knew when someone could see him, because it was only then that he could see himself–as now, mirrored in the shop windows of Main Street, kitted out with cap and bandanna and his full panoply of merit badges, from Agribusiness to Space Exploration, with stops along the way for Leatherwork, Shotgun Shooting, and, last but not least, Disabilities Awareness. He’d taken on Disabilities Awareness at the behest of his scoutmaster and pastor at the Lutheran church, Jim Quist (whose wife Elaine was in a wheelchair with MS), thinking it would be another easy score like Consumer Buying or Dog Care. It had turned out to be the single most useful merit badge on his bandolier, the one that had paid the biggest dividends in the afterlife.

Each badge was emblem of some essential mystery, the one thing you learn that is the key in the lock of that skill or study and which once you know it you’ll never forget. For the Disabilities Awareness badge that secret was that we are all disabled. There are shelves we can’t reach, doors we can’t open, languages we can’t speak–something that makes us unable to fit in no matter what kind of effort we make. Elaine Quist had helped Terry understand that, though as she had also said, quite truly, "It’s a lesson we all get taught in due course, without outside help."

She had a particular way of smiling when she said that that Terry had come to recognize as the Disabilities Awareness look. Also known as a wry smile, a sour grin, or sadder but wiser. It was a look you saw on almost all those newly dead when they realized that all their plans for the future had not just been put on hold, they were canceled. That trip to Dubuque to see Aunt Marianne for one last time would never happen. The bulbs from Gurney’s would never be planted. That last jar of corn relish from 1996 would never get brought up from the cellar, never be opened, never tasted.

Those were the losses that mattered most to the newly dead, not the things that got people riled up on talk radio. Once they were past the first shock, the bombshell announcing that they were at most only onlookers now, they stopped taking an interest in the official concerns of good citizens. Terry was an exception to the rule in that regard. He’d earned three of his merit badges for Citizenship (Citizenship in the Community, in the Nation, and in the World) and the habit of being a concerned citizen had stayed with him. Perhaps it was the thing that kept him especially glued to the here and now of Postville in the Third Millennium and allowed him to act as a latter-day Charon, ferrying the dead, once they were ready, to the other side. That, and a basic inclination to be helpful.

So here he was on the main street of Postville, looking at himself with astonishment in the front window of Mamie’s Thrift Shop and Video Rentals (which, sadly, hadn’t been open for business for the last two years). After blinking away his surprise, he scanned Main Street to see who it was who was looking at him. Usually you know at a glance. On a street of living people a dead person sticks out like a sore thumb. But not today. There was the usual crowd of Mexicans hanging out in front of Cucina Linda and two bearded rabbis dragging their male offspring along at a brisk pace, as though pursued (the Jewish women, young and old, lived in some kind of purdah, and were less often seen on the streets of Postville, except in pairs, pushing strollers and sporting almost identical wigs, as their religion required). There were even one or two indigenes, very old, very slow, rather sad. But where amidst this usual spectrum of Postville’s diversities was the dead somebody who had taken note of Terry?

There: half hidden round the corner of the Corner Cafe, the specter of Rabbi Irving Rosen, the oldest undeparted victim of the bombing of Mount Zion Synagogue and Terry’s favorite Jew. Rabbi Rosen had been hard to spot, because instead of having his attention fixed on Terry, the only other ghost in the area, he was watching the Corner Cafe’s sole customer, George Scully, tucking away a burger and fries and chatting with Deborah Carr, the lunchtime waitress. George was giving most of his attention to the burger, because it was still oozing juices from the grill and his shirt was fresh that morning and had to last another couple of days.

"Rabbi Rosen," said Terry, crossing the untrafficked street, "good morning. Enjoying the June weather?"

The rebbe’s tongue darted from the right side of his mouth, even as his lips puckered in a wincing Disabilities Awareness smile. The look seemed more at home on his face than on the faces of the newly dead goyim of Postville for whom irony was a novel sensation. He hadn’t had to die to develop a sense of humor.

"Yes," Rosen answered, "but I wish I could enjoy that hamburger instead."

"Hungry," said Terry. An observation, not a question.

"Should a dead man salivate like this? The longer I am dead the worse the hunger gets."

"Would you feel the same if he were eating pork?"

Rosen laughed. "If you don’t like kosher law, go argue with Moses. But to answer your question: yes. Starvation is no respecter of law. If he were shoveling down the shit of a pig and not its spiced ground flesh I’d feel the same envy in my gut. Whatever my tongue could taste I would lick with pleasure. They built Auschwitz to teach that lesson to the living. The dead can learn it for free." He stroked his gnarled, red-and-gray beard as a kind of seal, or Selah, to his brief lamentation.

"I don’t suppose you’ve ever eaten anything at the Corner Cafe."

"No. And that is a sign of what? That I disdain your town, your people, your faith?"

"Is it, Rabbi Rosen?"

Again, but chillier, the laugh; the flick of the tongue; the smile that mocked all miseries. "Of course it is. I can’t deny it, if I wanted to. But why should I want to? What pleasure have I now but honesty? Don’t you despise this town, these people, a faith that proved untrue?"

The compulsion to speak the truth was not reciprocal, and Terry did not have to answer the rebbe’s questions. He just stood there in his scout uniform, the politest of interrogators.

"This town was dying, you know, when we came here," the rebbe went on. "It was moribund, almost bankrupt. Only the taxes we paid kept it alive. Our taxes kept the schools open, though our children don’t attend them."

"And how did you vote on the bond issues?"